The American | Sulmona, Piazza Garibaldi — Twenty-One Arches and a Market He Can't Blend Into

Sulmona is where the film goes to be a town instead of a hiding place. Jack drives down out of the mountains to meet his contact, and suddenly there are people: a market in the square, awnings, crates, noise, the ordinary Italian business of buying lunch. He is visibly worse at this than he is at machining a rifle out of scrap.

The production made Sulmona its base camp, and it had to. L'Aquila, the original plan, was unusable after the April 2009 earthquake — the crew never set foot in the city — while Sulmona, an hour south and largely unharmed, still had hotels, streets, and a square that worked. The market sequence was shot there among real vendors, one of whom is said to have stopped a take to correct the proper technique for selling parmesan.

The square is Piazza Garibaldi, and its southern edge is the thing you will photograph before you photograph anything else: a medieval aqueduct of twenty-one pointed arches, raised under King Manfred in the 1250s, still running unbroken across the whole flank of the piazza. Ovid was born in this town. There is a statue, and he is not modest about it.

Come on a Wednesday or Saturday morning when the market is actually there and the arches are full of shadow. Buy something. Jack couldn't, and it nearly gives him away.

Photo: Artem Shepel via Pexels (Pexels licence).